


In the Bleak Midwinter (A Canticle for Advent)

by CaitlinFairchild



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e02 The Sign of Three, Injury Recovery, M/M, Major Character Injury, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 20:14:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4362674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaitlinFairchild/pseuds/CaitlinFairchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the autumn of 2014, Mary Watson shot Sherlock Holmes. This is what happened after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Bleak Midwinter (A Canticle for Advent)

**Author's Note:**

> This is NOT a new work, guys! (Um, sorry.) I accidentally deleted this older fic from my Ao3 last night. But if you haven't read it before, pretend it's new and enjoy!
    
    
    What can I give Him, poor as I am?  
    
    If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;  
    
    If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;  
    
    Yet what I can I give Him: give Him my heart.  
    
    ~Christina Rossetti

**September 23**

Bleeding out into one’s pleural cavity is an incomparable sensation.

The feeling is less disorienting than drowning, yet more immediate than smothering. Sherlock’s mind, growing increasingly untethered from his body, conjures the Golem, the flashing lights of the planetarium all around them. The giant’s distorted features twist into a sneer as he wraps his enormous hand around Sherlock’s chest and squeezes, hard. Sherlock gasps, involuntarily, and collapses.

Unfamiliar fingers strap an oxygen mask over his face, but he still can’t draw breath properly. John crouches down, next to him. Takes his hand, his palm so warm against Sherlock’s icy skin.

“Sherlock. Stay here, Sherlock. Stay with me.”

“What can I do?” Mary asks.

“You can get the hell out,” John seethes. “You don’t get to be a part of this anymore.”

Then Sherlock’s heart stops again, and everything gets a bit hazy after that.

***

**September 25**

Sherlock wakes, briefly, and turns his head to see John sitting in the chair by the door, staring fixedly at a spot on the far wall. He looks terrible, disheveled and unshaven and so much smaller than he ever has before, as if he were collapsing in on himself, a dying star.

 _That’s how he looked when I broke him,_ Sherlock thinks, and he gets it then, the last piece of evidence slots into place and he really truly finally sees what he did to John Watson when he died, and the pain beneath his ribs is so immediate and huge he looks down at his own body in surprise--

“John,” he croaks through parched lips. “there’s a tube sticking out of my chest.”

John looks over at him and smiles, a rictus stretched over a skull.

“Hemothorax,” he says.

Sherlock nods once, and sinks back down into unconsciousness.

***

**September 29**

He dreams of Magnussen’s office. The assassin, clad in black, back to him.

“Mary,” he breathes.

The assassin turns to face Sherlock, eyes burning with the unquenchable fever of madness.

“Miss me?” Moriarty asks, and shoots him between the eyes.

 _I’m sorry, John,_ Sherlock thinks as he dies, as the detonation charges reduce his mind palace to rubble and dust. _You’re in danger, and I failed you. I’m so sorry._

***

**October 8**

Of course Sherlock made his injury much, much worse by his actions. Of course he did. That’s what he does, doesn't he, make everything so much worse to make it better, except the better isn’t usually enough to make up for the worse, is it, and the red on his ledger just grows and grows.

But the drugs, well, Janine was right about that, the drugs are nice. Bad for the brain...stuff, but nice.

John is back at Baker Street; he’s been nicking Sherlock’s expensive shampoo and his clothes smell of the washing powder Mrs. Hudson uses. 

He comes to the hospital after work and sits there, just sits there, and Sherlock wishes he could give John a hit of his morphine. Opiates are terrible for brain stuff, but they’re brilliant for dulling the pain.

***

**October 13**

Sherlock wakes up in the middle of the night, disoriented and needing to pee. Dazed by morphine he tries to get up, forgetting he’s been in bed for three weeks, and immediately collapses to the floor in an undignified splay of bony, wasted limbs. He can’t get himself up, but at least it’s a new view, and he catalogues nine different varieties of textile fiber under the bed before the nurse finds him.

***

**October 14**

John hands Sherlock a sheet of paper. 

“Congratulations,” he says carefully, his face a cipher.

Sherlock looks at the paper.

“You still need follow up testing at three and six months, but most seroconversions happen in the first six weeks.”

“Looks like I dodged one bullet, then, at least,” Sherlock says, realizing as the words leave his mouth that he just said something really stupid.

“I wasn’t looking forward to cramming pills down your throat eight times a day for the rest of your life, so we both did,” John says. 

John scrubs the back of his neck, exhales.

He doesn’t smile.

***

**October 17**

John brings him a toothbrush and his soap and shampoo and pants and pyjama bottoms and dressing gown, and waits outside the stall as Sherlock takes the best shower of his life.

After settling Sherlock back into bed, tucking the blankets snugly around his legs, John slumps into the side chair. His stony rage has softened down into a amorphous gray sadness that Sherlock finds even more unbearable, somehow.

“Have you spoken to her?” Sherlock surprises himself by asking.

“No,” John answers, shortly.

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says, sincerely.

“I’ve thought a lot about it, and believe me when I tell you that this one time, Sherlock, none of this is your fault.”

“I didn’t mean sorry like that,” Sherlock says, even though he really did.

***

**October 20**

Sherlock has to learn how to breathe again, which is ridiculous, who has to be taught how to _breathe_ , idiots know how to breathe, even newborns can breathe without a perky ponytailed 28-year old having to teach them.

He is surly and abusive, deduces her Sloane Ranger past and multitudinous daddy issues, but Katie is made of sterner stuff. 

“You’ll never chase down another murderer if you have the lung capacity of an 80 year old coal miner,” she says.

“You mother prefers your older sister,” he says, head turned away from her, eyes closed.

Katie sighs.

“Mr. Holmes, the criminals of this world would love for you to give up right now, wouldn’t they? Just love it. An early Christmas present, for the bad men in the shadows. That’s what you’re giving them right this minute. Think on that, please, Mr. Holmes.”

Sherlock thinks of Magnussen, the flat planes of his face, the blank soullessness of his eyes. A shark, swimming behind glass. He had, briefly, forgotten. He feels small in that moment, and ashamed.

He turns to look at her, then, this woman who makes her living helping arseholes like him.

“Please,” he says, “call me Sherlock.”

***

**October 21**

Sherlock wraps his dressing gown around himself and walks straight out of the hospital, IV and all, to the restaurant on the corner. It’s amazing what you can get away with simply by behaving as if you have every right.

He keeps it together throughout the encounter, but he gets it wrong, he gets Magnussen wrong, and leaving he is suddenly so dizzy and exhausted that his legs give out from underneath him. Strong hands scoop his body up and bundle him into a waiting black car. He wakes up in his hospital bed. Nobody mentions it after.

***

**October 23**

John’s colour improves, slightly. He brings Chinese over and they eat lo mein while watching some crap reality show on ITV. He doesn’t smile, exactly, but he is alive and eating and _here_ , isn’t he, and a traitorous part of Sherlock's heart whispers to him that he may get to keep John Watson for himself, after all.

***

**October 31**

Molly brings him a single can of Mountain Dew for Halloween. He doesn’t even remember telling her about Florida, but he must have.

“It’s basically liquid candy, so,” she says.

“Where on earth did you find this?” he asks.

“On the Internet. I bought a six pack but you can only have them one at a time, they’re terrible for you, high fructose corn syrup and so much caffeine--”

“Thank you, Molly Hooper,” he says gravely, and goes to kiss her on the cheek.

“I’m still pissed off,” she says, but she lets him anyway.

He drinks it straight from the can, warm and fizzy, remembering smothering tropical heat and Miami nightclubs and cocaine.

_It was for a case, John. For a case._

Janine brings him copies of her latest tabloid interviews and a bag of wine gums. He gives the candy, unopened, to Katie.

“They’re from my...ex,” he says, the word oddly-shaped in his mouth. _No, won’t be saying that again._ “She didn’t really know me at all.”

***

**November 12**

He wakes once to an empty room, the scent of Clair de la Lune a fading whisper in the air.

***

**November 15**

They taper him down him from co-codamol to paracetamol. A spectacularly unpleasant time is had by all.

***

**November 17**

Sherlock and John step into an improbably gorgeous late fall afternoon.

Sherlock is pale to the point of greyness and in desperate need of a haircut. His Belstaff hangs on him like a blanket wrapped around a scarecrow. 

A black car is waiting to take them back to Baker Street. Of course. 

***

**November 21**

Mrs. Hudson, trying to fatten Sherlock back up, invites them down to her flat for an American Thanksgiving dinner.

“We’re having turkey in four weeks,” Sherlock says. “Why would we have it twice? Turkey isn’t even very good.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Sherlock,” sighs Mrs. Hudson, “something about Pilgrims and settlers or somesuch. Have some cranberries.”

“That’s not fruit,” Sherlock says in horror. “That’s a...cylinder of goo.”

John eats mashed potatoes and peas and turkey and compliments Mrs. Hudson on the trifle (she couldn’t find tinned pumpkin anywhere, she said, and Sherlock is grateful) and looks more like himself than he has since the night he learned the truth.

After, they sit in their armchairs before a blazing fire, absolutely stuffed full of food and drowsy. John stretches out his sock feet, almost touching Sherlock’s chair with his toes.

“I missed this,” he says quietly. “I mean, Mary and I were…I loved my life with her, I did, but...I missed this.”

Sherlock is sure it’s the ridiculous amount of food in his stomach, but for a moment it feels almost hard to breathe.

***

**November 25**

“Where are you going, John?”

“I’m going to work, Sherlock. It’s a new thing I’m trying on, working for a living. Charming little hobby.”

John is only gone for seven minutes when Sherlock hears the deliberate tread of his older brother.

“So nice of you to visit me in hospital, Mycroft.”

“I was certain you were in good hands.”

“The best, thank you.”

The two regard each other for several long moments.

“So,” Mycroft says neutrally. “Doctor Watson has returned to the nest, I see.”

“You have such a talent for stating the obvious, brother. Did they teach you that at Oxbridge?”

“Is this a...permanent shift in accommodations?”

Sherlock shrugs, miming nonchalance. “Having a domestic. You know how it goes.”

“No,” says Mycroft. “I really don’t.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. Mycroft picks lint off his jacket sleeve.

“I would ask you to stay, Mycroft, but I really don’t want you to.”

“Sherlock, is Mary Watson a threat to John?”

“No,” Sherlock says, surprised at how his voice sounds like a growl. “I wouldn’t allow that.”

“Of course not,” Mycroft says.

Interminable minutes pass.

“She’s carrying his child,” Mycroft says.

“Again with the obvious. Once is fine, two is just showing off.”

“She’s his wife.”

“What is your point, Mycroft?”

“You could keep him here,” Mycroft said. “You could keep him here, in your bowl. That would make you happy. That’s what you want. I know that.”

“You know nothing.”

“But is that what John Watson truly wants? Are you what he truly wants? Are you what he needs to be happy?”

 _I could be_ , thinks Sherlock for a fleeting, desperate moment. _If we could find our way back to that place, to the two of us against the world. I could be._

Mycroft sighs as if Sherlock was being particularly thick. “Satisfy your own wants, Sherlock, or give John what he truly needs. If you love him the way you think you do, then the choice is clear.”

Sherlock looks up several minutes later to an empty room. He had been so lost in thought he hadn’t even noticed when his brother left.

***

**November 27**

Sherlock wakes from a nap--he’s so tired, still, he looks and moves and acts like he’s better but he’s still healing and he gets so damn tired-- to John’s heavy, shuffling tread on the stairs.

He’s drunk.

John opens the door, enters, closes, leans against it for a long moment. Trying to pull himself together. He hangs his jacket on the coatrack, fumbling with thick numbed fingers, almost dropping it. He walks slowly, deliberately, into the sitting room.

_He went to see Mary, likely intending to end their relationship for good. Stood at the door. Lost his nerve. Defaulted to the Watson method of dealing with overpowering emotions--_

Not that Sherlock has the moral high ground on coping mechanisms, really.

John carefully lowers himself into his armchair, blows out a breath. Scotch.

“I know you’re intoxicated, John, so you really needn’t bother trying to conceal it.”

John grins, but it’s a bitter, ugly thing. “The great Sherlock Holmes sees all. As usual.”

“John,” says Sherlock neutrally.

No. It’s fine. ‘sfine. I’m not even mad at you. Well, yeah I am, I’m always pissed off at you, a little, and Jesus Christ am I tired of dragging that around, but right now? Tonight? I’m mostly not mad at you.”

“John,” Sherlock tries again. “Alcohol is lowering your emotional threshold and causing disinhibition--”

“Shut up. Just...shut. Up.”

Sherlock shuts up.

“I went over there to tell her I was _done_. To tell her we were through, finished, no more. But. I couldn’t. I _still love_ her. If I could walk away I would be all right. But I can’t because I still love a lying murderer. And she’s having my baby, there’s also that. God, what a fucking mess.”

Sherlock is silent, letting John unspool.

“Why…” John swallows thickly, tears glittering unshed in his eyes. “Why does everyone I love _lie_ to me? Tell me, Sherlock, you should know better than anyone.”

Sherlock remembers all that he had said, weeks ago, about why John Watson chose the people he did but realizes, in a rare show of remarkable good judgment, that this was not to moment for fact-based debate.

_Solve the case, Sherlock. Use your pathetic, stunted arsenal of emotional understanding. What does John need?_

_He needs to go to bed before he flays himself open any further._

“You have work tomorrow. I’m getting you a glass of water and then I’m putting you to bed.”

John scrubs at his eyes and nods.

Sherlock goes into the kitchen, fetches a tall glass of water and two aspirin. He takes them to the base of the steps, then stops to reconsider. In his weakened state there is no way he can help John up the steps or give assistance if he needs it.

Sherlock’s bedroom it is, then. Sherlock turns on the bedside lamp and sets the water and aspirin on the table. He returns to the sitting room to see John already dozing in his chair.

“Come along, John,” he says, tugging at his sleeve. John blinks sleepily and nods, lets Sherlock take his hand and lead him to the bedroom, and God just that thought alone is doing terrible things to the pit of Sherlock’s stomach, not to mention points southward. 

Sherlock gently puts his hands on John’s shoulders and presses downward, and John sits on the edge of the bed, collapsing like a marionette with cut strings. Sherlock gets him arranged in bed, but he can’t bend down to untie his shoes, too much pressure on his lungs. So he kneels, instead, by the edge of the bed, untying John’s shoes and slipping them off with the utmost care.

“I’m sorry, Sherlock,” says John. “You’re still healing and I come home pissed and that’s not fair.”

“Nothing is fair,” says Sherlock. “Life’s not fair. It’s fine.” He places John’s second shoe next to its mate on the floor. “Are you going to be sick, do you think?”

John shakes his head. “Us Watsons can hold our liquor,” he murmurs with a small smile.

Sherlock looks at him then, so much older and greyer than he was just a few weeks ago, and something warm and aching rises in his chest. Before he can stop himself, he brushes the hair off John’s forehead with infinite tenderness.

John reaches out, then, encircling Sherlock’s wrist with his fingers. 

“Sherlock,” he breathes, and pulls him forward.

The kiss is slow, almost chaste, then John’s mouth opens to him and it feels like falling. It feels like dying. John tastes of loneliness and tears and scotch, and Sherlock considers it for just the space of a heartbeat.

He breaks the kiss, and looks at the man in his bed. John’s eyes are wide and dark in the lamplight.

“Stay with me,” John says in a whisper.

And it kills something inside Sherlock to shake his head.

“Not like this,” he says.

“Please, Sherlock.”

“John.” He rests his head on John’s chest, feels the beat of his heart.

_When I take you to bed, it will be awake, clear-eyed and willing._

John smiles, then, so sadly, and Sherlock realizes with a bit of a thump that he said the words aloud.

“You are a gentleman, Sherlock Holmes. No matter what the papers say.”

Sherlock straightens, rises, kisses John on his forehead, a whisper of lips.

“Good night, John.”

He switches the lamp off and leaves.

***

**November 28**

Later, much later, as night turns the corner toward morning, Sherlock lies on the couch and remembers.

His heart and mind carried him away from John, protected him from a moment of weakness, but his traitorous body rebels, wanting, and he takes himself in hand, stroking hard, remembering the feel of John’s mouth, the salt of his skin. When he comes, the pleasure feels like damnation.

John is gone from the flat by the time Sherlock wakes.

When he returns in the evening he makes tea and they watch the news.

Neither says a word.

***

**December 5**

John is sitting in his chair, the memory stick in his hands. He stares at it, hard, considering.

Sherlock brings him tea.

“Either look at it or don’t. Stop prevaricating,” he says.

John looks at him, sharply.

Sherlock settles himself in his chair. “Though I think, if I were you, I would just get rid of it. Throw it in the fire.”

John cocks his head. “Oh you would. And why is that?”

Sherlock shrugs, miming indifference, heart cracking. “Because the past is done. Can’t be changed. The future is limitless. You can have a future with Mary. Why throw it away over ghosts?”

***

**December 12**

Mummy calls and invites him out for Christmas.

Sherlock hasn’t gone home for Christmas in seven years, but he accepts.

“I’m bringing a few friends, if you don’t mind.”

“The more the merrier, darling,” she burbles.

***

**December 14**

Wiggins is sitting on the couch, playing with his tea spoon, trying desperately not to shake, not to show how badly he needs to fix.

“I need your help with a delicate matter,” Sherlock says.

“My help? I thought you was back with your mister.”

“He’s not my mister,” Sherlock says evenly.

Wiggins’ expression goes carefully neutral. “Right. My mistake, sorry, sir.”

Sherlock gives him a hundred quid. “Don’t put it all in your arm. Get yourself something decent to wear.”

***  
**December 18**

He calls Mary. Invites her to Christmas.

“He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you. He loves you, and I think he wants to talk to you but needs a pretext.”

“Oh, really. So we’re back in secondary school, then. Did he want you to pass me a note?”

“Also, you’ll love my mum. She’s delightful, or so I’m told.”

***

**December 25**

“Come have a cigarette with me, Mycroft.”

Mycroft looks at him with alarm.

“Are you mad? Mummy will have a fit.”

“Come on, Mycroft, it’s Christmas.”

They smoke their cigarettes in the dreary chill of the front garden. Sherlock briefly visualizes the blindfold, the drumroll, the firing squad.

“Also, your loss would break my heart,” Mycroft says.

He knows. His brother always knows.

 _Mine already is_ , Sherlock suddenly realizes. He thinks of vulnerability and pressure points and the enormous price of love.

He has broken his own heart in two to keep John Watson’s safe. As part of the bargain, though, he does get one last adventure with his best friend. One last dragon to slay.

Not the most fair of trades, but he will take it. He has no choice. He never really had a choice.

He crushes the cigarette under his heel and strides into his parents’ house, eager to begin. The game, after all, is on.

  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [(PODFIC) In The Bleak Midwinter (A Canticle for Advent) by Caitlin Fairchild](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9706310) by [AvidReaderLady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvidReaderLady/pseuds/AvidReaderLady)




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